Jukebox

Edited to add: I’m sorry to say that I don’t have enough server space for all my audio, so most jukebox playlists become inactive after a few months. This is one. Very sorry. But the music is worth seeking out, it’s great!

These are random happy songs: not particular “favorites” that I seek out, but songs that always make me happy to find them by accident in the world — on the pub CD player, in the supermarket, on the car radio of the guy next to me at the red light. It’s as if I passed someone familiar on the street who suddenly takes me by the hand and says Come on, and walks me to some happy place inside myself.

Happiness is physical; I don’t hear these songs as much as feel them, their rhythms and resonance. I see them, as if they were memories or stories I’ve told myself so often they’ve become something like memory. They don’t make me ecstatic or fierce or electric or take the top of my head off with existential joy, the way some music does. They simply make me happy; although as I get older, I realize that as simple as it is, happy isn’t a door that opens to everyone. I am grateful to this music, and to sunshine and rivers and laughter and cats and my mom’s tuna casserole and the soft ice cream cones my dad bought me in summers when I was a kid, and to so many more simple things that make me happy.

“Hitchcock Railway” by Jose Feliano is one of my oldest music-memories: my parents played Feliciano a lot when I was a kid. Whether it’s true or not, I associate it with parties: our very small house stuffed with loud, laughing people in bell-bottomed blue jeans and fringed vests, or miniskirts and sandals, or golf shirts and plaid sports jackets (we knew lots of different folks) who put their beer in our bathtub (full of ice for the occasion) and ate the artichokes that were constantly boiling in huge pots on our stove, while music played in the background. When I was about 10 or so, my dad started letting me bartend behind a piece of plywood set up on stools across our kitchen door: I served Canadian Club and water, as I recall, and got every whisky-drinking man in the place absolutely hammered. It was one of my first experiences of power over men: in the 60’s South, it was pretty much a time-honored gendered strategy for women to carefully gauge a man’s capacity for alcohol and then use it in whatever way worked best. Since I didn’t have any particular goals at the time, the lesson was simply that if I gave those men a strong drink, they’d sip it, raise a wry eyebrow, say Larry, she’s learning early! and then laugh and wander off to find someone to flirt with. And come back for another, possibly with a conspiratorial Now don’t you tell my wife you’re getting me drunk! It was all very instructive. And boy, those parties were fun.

I became a huge Police fan in college. By this time, I had fled Northwestern University and come home to finish my education at the University of South Florida, and live with my mom. It was generally my job to wash the dishes, which was often a special horror-movie experience in our poor little decrepit house: the kitchen ceiling had partially fallen in, the windows were drafty, the baseboards gapped and it was Florida, kids — every open space was a bug highway. I am not sure I ever washed an entire set of dishes without a close encounter with a Rhode-Island-sized cockroach.

But I had a fifty-foot headset cord that easily stretched from the turntable in the living room to the kitchen sink: so I would put on happy music and stomp bugs to the beat when I had to. I listened to The Police all the time, and “Every Little Thing” always made me feel as though I was moving forward, transcending the dirty dishes and the bugs, going to a place where whatever I did, even this, must be magic in some way. I felt the same way driving to acting classes, or driving home late at night from rehearsal, when the song would come on the radio: hopeful, looking for magic.

I was out dancing last month and DJ Stacey rolled us into “China Grove” and oh my goodness, I thought I would levitate. Some people actually left the dance floor (huh?!!!) as if to say, Well, how can you dance to this? So I showed them. This song is all about the Southern childhood that I never actually had, in a small town full of funky folks who lived their lives to Southern rock and (in my story) made each other pies and fixed their own cars and gave each other space to be (and gossiped like hell about whatever you did with your space).

So here’s some of my happy for you, with the hope that you have some happy today in whatever way works for you.